Ho Chi Minh-Bangkok-Guangzhou-Wuhan-San Francisco

Let’s call it the adventure from Asia to America… 4 flights, 5 days the best and worst hotel and some truly sour faced people.

Leaving Vietnam - after saying our farewells to Wazza over a few 50cent beers we jumped on a long but uneventful nightbus from Nha Trang to Ho Chi Min. We arrived bright and early and navigated our way to the airport on a local bus without a word of english! Similarly we found our rundown hotel in Bangkok using public transport and made it poolside. 

Due to a slight booking mistake we had two nights in Bangkok instead of the desired one so we decided a wee wonder to the park would keep us entertained. Then spent a few hours walking around the grounds and even had a workout on the many free open aired gym machines. As the mercury began to hit the late 30’s it was time to seek out the pool.

Now for the real adventure to begin….. our flight to Guangzhou was harmless enough until we hit the immigration desk. I seem to recall writing about our experiences with boarders before… here is another.

So China has a policy that no visa is required if you are transiting and staying less than 72 hours. Cool that is what we were doing. Only our airline failed to inform us that we had a very short flight and lay over in another city in china which therefore negated the visa….

To cut along story short we avoided paying immigration anything and sat in the airport for 7 long hours (until after midnight) and obtained a free 24 hour visa (we were in china for longer – don’t get their logic). So at 1am successfully in China we were put up by our airline at a very pimping hotel. After a huge sleep a free breakfast and lunch we were finally turfed out. 

So we thought we better make the most of our free reign and made it into the city and the skungiyest hotel of our travels to date on the metro (Wazza the bed was harder than that one you had). The city of Guangzhou had more high rises than I have seen in my entire life, was much cleaner and less chaotic than anticipated but the people had to be the most sour. We wandered around the city center which was entertaining enough and then proceeded to the top of the Canton tower which is certainly high. The views from the top were fine if not a little restricted by the dense pollution. A fine meal guess ordered by the pictures followed before bed then a plane to America. 

So the people and the service… The saying goes a smile means hello in a 1000 different languages well that might just exclude China. Everywhere we went we were met with cold hard stares. Not even a smile, hello or “knee how” would crack their face…. This was a huge contrast to the waves, high fives and hellos we got wherever we went in Cambodia and Vietnam. 

The service was worse, at one restaurant we could not help but laugh out loud in the face of the waitress as she informed us to pay (the only word she said) while she was face down on her phone. 

Put it down to an experience but china you are not for me!